Sean McManus, TelecomTV (00:06):
Hi, I am Sean McManus from TelecomTV and I'm on the Wind River booth here at MWC. I'm joined now by Paul Miller, CTO at Wind River and Aji Ed, VP and head of cloud RAN at Nokia. Thank you both for joining me today.

Paul Miller, Wind River (00:21):
Thanks for having us.

Sean McManus, TelecomTV (00:22):
Let me ask you, first of all, what's the nature of the collaboration between Nokia and Wind River, Paul?

Paul Miller, Wind River (00:28):
Thanks. So we have a really exciting partnership going on here where we've effectively got the world's best cloud technology that's being used for the deployment of vRAN and Open RAN globally, now working with Nokia, one of the industry-leading, great RAN providers globally.

(00:42):
Aji, tell us more

Aji Ed, Nokia (00:46):
Obviously when we started the anyRAN journey a couple of years ago, we strongly believed in partnerships because we believe that it's about industry ecosystem partnership, which makes the difference. And here we are, we have started a strategic partnership with Nokia and Wind River to really create the high-performing cloud RAN solutions with Nokia's RAN expertise and telecom expertise and combined with the Wind River's cloud infrastructure solutions. So looking forward to it.

Paul Miller, Wind River (01:18):
We've got some really interesting technology combinations here where Wind River with our cloud technology, we have incredibly low TCO, which is really important as the industry looks to adopt Open RAN and Nokia has some incredibly high-performance systems with their specialised accelerators and RAN software that, together, create a solution for Open RAN that we think is unmatched in the industry.

Sean McManus, TelecomTV (01:37):
Aji, tell us more about what Nokia brings to the partnership.

Aji Ed, Nokia (01:41):
So, of course, I think what Paul mentioned just now. Of course we are a RAN player, we bring the RAN expertise and we have high-performing, purpose-built systems. Our mission and ambition that we have been reiterating for the last couple of years, is that high-performing cloud RAN systems are critical for introducing cloud RAN into the network because most of the networks are Brownfield networks. And in order to co-exist with the purpose-built network, we need to have the parity, we need to have the performance consistency and that's exactly what we bring with our cloud RAN solutions. So we are excited about how the cloud RAN journey is evolving and, of course, together with Wind River as well.

Sean McManus, TelecomTV (02:26):
Paul, tell us more about what Wind River contributes to the partnership.

Paul Miller, Wind River (02:29):
Sure. So about five or six years ago, we co-founded an open-source initiative called Starling X in the open-source community and this was an attempt to build a cloud system that really embraced the challenges of RAN and distributed cloud technology. If you look at legacy cloud technology that many of our competitors are bringing to market, it's really designed for enterprise deployments where it's in a single datacentre. Now if you look at the RAN architecture, you have tens of thousands of sites at any service provider that are geographically separated over a wide area network and deploying and managing that infrastructure is incredibly complex. So we built our cloud technology to embrace the challenges with self-healing control planes and distributed awareness and single pane of glass and that's really created an innovative modern cloud technology based heavily on Kubernetes that service providers can use to deploy a completely software-defined network upon which we can bring applications, such as Nokia's, to power the RAN.

Sean McManus, TelecomTV (03:23):
What would you say that your collaboration delivers to customers in terms of the value they get from it, Paul?

Paul Miller, Wind River (03:29):
I think what you've got here is two of the major industry leaders in this space combining our forces to have a tightly integrated solution. One of the hesitancies of adopting Open RAN is really tied to the complexities of integration. And so when partners, such as Nokia and Wind River, work together outside of the customer environment to tightly integrate the solution, we take away some of the friction of the adoption of Open RAN, which is often perceived to be because of the disaggregation and the multiple parties. At the same time, we still get the power of the disaggregation because the customer gets the control over the competitive nature of each of the layers in the network but without the risk of having integration problems within their network.

Sean McManus, TelecomTV (04:08):
Brilliant. Aji, what would you add?

Aji Ed, Nokia (04:09):
Yeah, absolutely. I'll tell you, it's the end of the day. It's all about how to make the most cost-efficient, energy-efficient and capacity-optimised solutions that are fully automated, whether you can help the operators to really create faster time-to-market innovative services for the industry. So I think it's all about how do we eliminate some of these automation challenges or deployment challenges in order to really scale it to tens and thousands of site deployments. That's exactly the challenge that we are going to eliminate with the kind of partnership, using the fully validated, fully certified solutions coming from both Nokia and Wind River together.

Sean McManus, TelecomTV (04:47):
Tell us about your plans for the future and your next steps.

Paul Miller, Wind River (04:51):
Well, we're on quite an interesting journey here. Over the past several years, we've now built and deployed, at production scale, highly capable cloud technology. And as we went through that process, we learned from our customers that they really needed operational toolings and automation. And so adding single-pane-of-glass analytics, so you can see reporting and visualisation of everything that's happening in the network, and then adding orchestration and automation functions, so the system could be single click, easy to deploy, and a really low cost of operations. That's what's led us to today and what we're showing at the show here is some really exciting things. The ability to use AI within that platform. We really feel that artificial intelligence can be deployed in a manner to help operations staff. So people that are trying to interact with these hugely distributed complex systems are often writing scripts and tooling to try to get information out of these systems and correct and analyse problems. Here, we have an AI demonstrating that you can just talk to it in natural language, ask it questions, and it dynamically fires the APIs into the underlying systems and this eliminates a tremendous amount of work for the service providers. So really what we're pursuing across the board, whether it be integration with partners like Nokia or adding automation and artificial intelligence, this is about making it lower cost and easier to use for the service provider.

Sean McManus, TelecomTV (06:05):
Brilliant. Aji, what would you add about your future plans?

Aji Ed, Nokia (06:08):
Yeah, so we strongly see that the journey to the future is through the fusion of AI, cloud and connectivity. And we are in the middle of this cloud transformation journey and we strongly see how the trend is moving towards this and what are the challenges that we're trying to resolve for our customers. Automation, the deployment challenges, the faster time to market, bringing new services, agility, network acceleration of let's say bringing new services or creating a highly performing network. So all of these different challenges that we need to resolve, assisting with a hybrid network model, which means we are going to co-exist with let's say, existing architecture, that we have, but it'll be a transitioning to fusion of cloud and AI combined. So this is where we see the partnerships like Nokia and Wind River would help this transformation for our customers by providing the fully automated, fully validated, highly performing, energy-efficient, highly optimised solutions to our customers.

Sean McManus, TelecomTV (07:14):
That's been brilliant. Thank you so much for talking me through your collaboration and I wish you all the best for the future of it.